


Kings of Arcadia

by Spylace



Series: Arcadia [2]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: Mirror Universe
Genre: Academy Era, Alternate Universe – Werewolf, Attempted Murder, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, M/M, Mirror Universe, Mutants, Other, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Political Intrigue, Prejudice, Superpowers, Whump, Xenophilia, Xenophobia, disphoria, dubcon, noncon, pack mentality, psychic powers, typical mirror stuff, woman being awesome, woman in fridge, women of color
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-01
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-07 00:50:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Empire does not run on bloodshed alone. It requires discipline, obedience, and above all, knowing when to yield.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Academy-era mirror universe with a dash of things that go bump at night. 
> 
>  
> 
> ...Or that one document that should have never been reopened.

The shuttle leaving Iowa travels at supersonic speeds. For a brief moment, they are held suspended in midair, punching through the clouds and into the stratosphere where the engine kicks into an overdrive, bright and loud at the edge of their vision.

Bones McCoy white-knuckles the armrest evoking names and phrases which haven’t passed through his lips in months, convinced that with each bump and shake of the airframe, they will all die horribly in a flaming wreckage. His terror is catching, it might have seemed adorable the way the raw-faced recruits squirmed in their seats at the stranger who looks like he’s been living off the streets, dressed lovingly in Frank’s hand-me-downs.

The other shifter grits his teeth—sounds painful.

In the air, Jim’s focus spirals past the slobbering pups in their seats, the gorgeous she-wolf with legs he wouldn’t mind wrapped around his hips. The flight attendant who had brow-beaten some of the rowdier cadets into their seats stares back at him with hawk-eyed intensity until he grows bored, returns back to Bones dragging a hand in a warm, skin-on-denim rasp against the inseam as though he might like to build a house and live there.

Bones jerks away and he narrows his eyes. Fucking tease, skittish now they’ve rejoined civilization and he’s gotten the use of two hands. But even he can’t hide the welcoming flare of his hazel green eyes, eerily bright like the nacelles of a starship when their eyes meet, teeth white and caught in a trying grimace. He wrinkles his eyes with affection and delight. Leonard stiffens, caught.

“Look at that Bones.” Jim whispers into his ears, gesturing towards the window where he can see clouds hug the shuttle’s wings before spinning away. He can see Earth now they’re approaching a low orbit, lights blinking sleepily in the morning sun. He trembles as a hand wraps around the back of his neck, keeping his gaze fixed firmly outside. Others turn to look, eyes roving hungrily at the sight of weakness. Jim deliberately nips him in the ear, coaxing him out of his peri-flight fugue. “All of that could be ours.”

++

After seeing Bones kiss the ground in genuine relief, he is shuffled off into registration where a sniveling Tellarite, his face rough with bruises, hastily puts together his enrollment packet under Pike’s imperious gaze. He is given a set of uniforms and a cardkey for his dorm room. He is to report immediately to the student seminar.

“Where’s Bones?” He demanded.

“Your dog?”

He’d forgotten that Pike had been there at the bar, watching him rip open someone’s face when the man hadn’t gotten off him fast enough.

“McCoy,” He says sullenly, like the name is a secret to be held on his tongue. “The guy sitting next to me.”

“You mean the washout you snuck aboard my shuttle?”

A part of him bristles in the defense of the other shifter even though he’d known _McCoy_ for less than a day. “He got picked up by medical, probably needed an extra body. He’s not your concern now.”

Jim swallows his protests. Pike might have been human but he is dangerous. He is like what Winona would have been had she a husband who hadn’t _sacrificed_ himself, a son she loved and the other she would have loved to hate.

“He’s mine.”

“We’re not in the business of babysitting.” Pike retorts sharply.

Kirk narrows his eyes.

“You leave that shit at the door or you won’t last a week here.”

“I thought you wanted me to get one up on my old man.”

Pike replies coolly, “George Kirk is dead. That’s one way to go about it.”

 ++

The first few weeks at the Academy are hectic and Jim feels the loss of the other wolf’s presence like a lost limb. It couldn’t be helped; both registered late and had to settle with classes and schedules that are so far off the charts they were no longer in them. The fact that they are in separate tracks worsens the matters. But he itches, the wolf thrumming with nervous energy at the loss of his companion.

At night in the dorm room with his roommate sitting across the room nervously tidying up his own notes, Jim pulls roughly at his dick, groaning appreciatively and imagining all the things he could do to Bones now that he was back to being human. He misses the collar though and wonders if the other wolf would tolerate having one put on him again. Baby steps, he thinks, baby steps. It wouldn’t be amiss to show his appreciation and approval.

He frowns.

He has to find him first.

 ++

Kirk searches the campus for the next few weeks, scenting wisps of smells that meant nothing or that he was slowly going insane. Under his workload, the theory isn’t too far off. Who knew Starfleet actually made you _study_?

The moon is full. His wolf growls, restless beneath his skin.

Where was Bones? It demands. Where was the one who called me alpha?

His eyes light up in answer.

He goes barcrawling. It backfires spectacularly.

The moon is _full_.

Back in Riverside, he had never known what Frank had meant when the man said the fateful words, the moon was full. During a full moon, the Iowan countryside was filled with shifter song, the baleful lows of bears and deer who were too afraid to come into the civilized country. The moon made them mad but its silver-fingered madness never touched Jim, he was above it, or so he thought.

When Winona was home, she’d unlock Frank’s silver collar and let him fall in a graceless heap at her feet, a twitching moaning bundle of fur that reminded him of a hairy cockroach. Compared to her, Jim was a little more than that bratty kid across the street, playing ding-dong-ditch until someone caught him at it and chopped his fingers off.

Frank always screamed, screamed for her, screamed for something but nobody ever came. And when the night was over, the moon casting a pall over the town of riverside, population infinity, he was back, collared, meek, belly stiff with fresh bruises.

Something tells him not to go, an inborn instinct of thousands of years in making. Different mélange of sights and smells, bitches ripe for taking, pups too stupid to know any better, and the defeated furtively trying to sneak off before somebody else caught scent of their blood, struck him with the force of a sledgehammer, leaving him sick. More than ever, he misses Bones, his unconditional solidarity, his black shadow.

But Jim Kirk is a creature of habit. An itch starts a third of the way through the term as though stranger is riding alongside his skin. This is the longest dry spell he’s ever been through and he doesn’t like it. Riverside, despite its status as a hick town, supported workers from all across the country, all across the galaxy working on starships in clear view of the cornfields. He’d had his pick of the crops, a disapproving Bones dissuading any jealous partners. He was also within a convenient reach at all times when he went to bed without anyone, jaws aching with residual pain.

Wolves mounted each other to show dominance. Sex with Bones had been different. It had felt right.

The little fish get disposed of first. Freshmen so wide-eyed and innocent compared to rest for all that they are just as vicious. But they are vicious in a way little birds in a nest are vicious, magpies all of them, fighting over a bit of worm or a twig their mother brings. They are unrefined, shifty and undisciplined. Jim isn’t any better but at least, he knows what he is.

His instincts screams at him to tear out the cunt’s fingers from his thighs, slam its melon-sized reptilian face against the counter and go. But he doesn’t. Whatever he and Bones were, it is nothing. The stupid dog doesn’t dictate who he fucks.

The girl laughs as she hooks her ankles around his ass, the silk of her thighs rippling like pale sand around his fingers. He breathes into her musk, the tang of drugs and alcohol and something that marks her intrinsically human and thinks, this is acceptable.

His wolf protests violently.

All night, he’s on the edge whispering either sweet nothings or growled threats into someone’s ears. Even senior students know to stay away, forewarned or maybe because of his stormy face. Shifters throw him knowing looks, some sympathetic, others downright leery. He throws a fist and all thoughts of a good time go out the window as a broken beer bottle is shoved under his rib.

The unofficial rule on the campus was that there are no shifters on campus. Starfleet, being the intergalactic branch of the military needs a constant supply cannon fodder and someone more durable than ordinary human. Shifters, psychics and augments all apply and are desired. But shifters never last long in space, too deeply tied to their homes. Psychics eventually go insane after a few years in the black, the unceasing hemorrhage of their thoughts, their crew’s thoughts causing a burnout until they had to be reset or terminated. Augments are little more than slaves.

They’re not immortal. It’s the first thing Frank taught him after he fell out of a tree, Sam quick to comm. their mother who laid one on him before whisking him away to hospitals. Shifters are fast, stronger than men. But they can be hurt, bound by silver and shot for being different. They can be injured, crippled, suffer from disease. They can also die.

Face against the sticky floor, Jim remembers. He grabs the fuckwad’s ankle and pulls.


	2. Chapter 2

Jim bleeds out on the floor after the asshole skewers him in the gut with a broken bottle.

The asshole is right there beside him, gurgling through his open throat. At the very least, he will have the satisfaction of seeing the other man go first.

His breathing stops short inside his lungs and his vision flickers like a TV with a bad reception. Feet surround him cadets in reds, shifters, aliens and some of the bar patron salivating and waiting for him to die.

Jim bares his teeth. He didn’t come to fucking ‘Cisco to die just like he didn’t crawl inside the bar to die—he just wanted to look, he came looking, looking for Bones, a replacement for Bones, a wolf, something and his wolf rumbles discontent because it’s fucking useless like how dark the lighting is in here, he can barely see the pair of boots that kick him onto his back looking him over like someone’s trying to see if he’s worth saving.

Not medical then, medical professionals don’ come to dives like this, they wouldn’t have bothered with him in the first place. _But Bones would have_ and he fumes at the fact that the other man is gone. His savior is the she-wolf from Iowa, from the bar where the honorable Captain netted him hook, line, and sinker like a wet-between-the-ears pup. When she kneels down, he twists his claws in her pretty red blouse and questions if she’d mind wearing another sort of red.

She laughs at him.

“Go ahead.” She purrs.

Jim’s grip slackens.

“Fuu _u_ —”

 ++

“I think this belongs to you.”

His vision swims. It feels like that one time he went out on the lake in winter and Sam pushed him in. He’d always said it was an accident but Jim knew, he knew from the moment he saw his blurry grin through the water, the amorphous shape of his golden wolf waiting patiently for his body to float up.

“Is he even alive?”

“See for yourself.”

It’s Bones, it’s Bones, it’s such a relief to hear his voice. He surges up, his wolf ecstatic as he licks his wrist, any part he can reach really, and breathes him in, the cloying scent of decontamination and sickness falling to the wayside as he digs at it, unearthing the familiar black-masked wolf.

Bones looks tired and unreasonably upset.

“Idiot” He says, his hand broad and warm against his broken chest.

“Welcome back” 

++

“Thirty-seven stitches.” Bones says grimly. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?” He throws the PADD in his lap with more force than strictly necessary. It’s entertaining. Jim drinks it all in, licking his lips in anticipation of what’s to come. The gut-wound was completely worth seeing the other man in his medical blues, the fabric pulled taut across his shoulders and his chest. As far as he can see, no one has laid claim to him. That’s good. Something loosens inside of him like a faucet. That just means nobody has to die.

“Bones” Jim croons. These are some seriously good drugs. He reaches out to touch but the other wolf spins away in contempt, lips pulled tight like he smells something off. “Bones?”

“That is _Doctor_ to you cadet.”

Alarm bells go off.

He tries again because he’s Jim Kirk. There are no such things as no-win scenarios.

Bones grunts when he grabs him harder than necessary, pulling him back to the biobed and hooking and ankle around the inside of his knee. The stitches on his stomach pulls like it’s reminding him to be careful. Bones’ eyes are flat and unimpressed, a glimmer of jade dust against the bedrock. “No Jim” He says firmly, untangling the elegant, long fingers from his own. “Not like this.”

Jim goes from loopy to pissed in two seconds flat. He pushes himself off the biobed and crowds the other shifter against the curtains.

“You seem to have forgotten your place.”

“No _cadet_ ,” Bones snarls, lips crinkling back. “You seem to have forgotten _yours_.” And it’s an awful, awful feeling that claws at his chest that Jim’s lost him somehow.

“What is going on?”

Bones answers grimly, “If you can’t figure that out then god help me, I will put you down myself.”

“Submit”

“No”

Jim pins him against the biobed. The worst part is that the other shifter lets him like it’s a big sacrifice on his part. Jim’s not even hard. But he is aware of Bones’ free hands and his supple strength. Starfleet looked great on the southern wolf. It’s sloughed off the vestiges of country living, the weight he gained sitting on Jim’s lap and drinking beer. Bones the human looks hard cut out from the fatted mold of the wolf he’d been hiding in. He looks dangerous as though he’s the one in control.

It’s McCoy as Jim had never known him, bipedal and clean, hair combed into a neat sidepart and so utterly human.

“Doctor?”

Jim raises his hackles. The woman raises a cool eyebrow in response.

From the uniform, she’s a nurse not a student. There is a scar that bisects her right eye and she lifts her chin like her disability is something to be proud of, proof that she survived. He can respect that. She too is a wolf, a wolf that belongs to _McCoy_. Jim gets ready to pounce when he’s twisted sideways, a hypo in his neck as he chokes on his own tongue.

Outmaneuvered, he can only gape like a fish as McCoy growls "Know your place cadet."

“You _bitch_...”

The whine of warming agonizer is unmistakeable. Chapel’s hand is steady as she points it at him squarely between the eyes. At this distance, he’ll be lucky just to be blinded.

“It’s fine Chapel.” McCoy says as the sedative takes hold, Jim’s body growing limp.

“Her?” He rasps.

Chapel sneers, her canines openly bared.

“How ‘bout you don’t piss off people who put you back together?”

“You’re mine.” Jim snaps.

“I am not yours.” McCoy corrects, dumping his body back in the biobed. “You’re a fucking redshirt, did you really think I came down here for you?”

He laughs.

“Then why are you down here Bones? You should be off sucking an admiral’s _co_ —”

He swallows his words when McCoy drives a thumb into his gut with an angry face.

"Let's just say I had a prudent investment to make."

“Shall I call security sir?” Chapel asks before his vision goes dark.

“No” Says McCoy the fucking cunt.

Jim thinks he imagines the hand caressing his hair. He passes out.

++ 

It takes him a while to figure out Bones’ words. Admittedly, he’s not at his best after being tossed out on his ass and a note telling him to suck it up but it only takes him a couple of minutes to swindle painkillers from a pill dispenser and he spends the rest of the weekend pulling on his stitches just to hear them pop.

Frank had warned him, the dipshit was always warning him off one thing or another thinking they could make a pack of two, that humans were weak and like all weak things, their weakness made them cunning and mean.

Bones was still his—that Jim is sure of, couldn’t abide by if it wasn’t true. They are wolves and shifters. Starfleet is an institution meant for humans. So they play at being humans. As humans, there are certain social customs McCoy adheres to. Jim thinks this over in his head. He had won the wolf part over, he just had to appeal to the human half.

Jim smiles. On his PADD, he blows up the schedule of a certain she-wolf he had in mind.

++

It is a testament to Nyota Uhura’s reputation that she wears her hair long and unfettered, tied up in a high ponytail that trails down in a dark oil slick down one shoulder. Her rivals avoid her, contempt and envy souring their expressions. Her admirers, of which there were many, simpers at the whiff of her cunt when she turns her knee to an angle under the desk.

“You’re not a wolf.” He says in wonder, kicking himself for not noticing sooner. Bones would have noticed. He was good at shit like that. It’s what made him a good doctor. But Bones, is not here right now.

“And you” Uhura says, her eyes cool and appraising. “Are not as dumb as I thought. What do you want Kirk?”

“Maybe I just wanted to thank my savior.” Jim says innocently.

“Hardly” The woman dismisses as the lecture begins.

“So what are you?” He asks, mildly curious. “A dog, a wolf-offspring maybe but you smell too strong for that.”

“Some of us are here to study.” She points out, turning the page on her PADD to the introductory chapter.

“Please” Jim snorts, “We both know you could teach this class yourself if it weren’t for regulations and well...” he waggles his eyebrows, startling a thin smile from the woman’s lips. She leans forward, warming his cheeks with her cocoa skin. A knife presses against his thigh.

“Don’t mistake my altruism for weakness.”

“Never” He swears and she pulls back mollified.

“Kirk, what are you doing here?”

Jim grins easily.

“I need a tutor.”

“So go find one.” She says in a cold voice.

“I want you.”

The nasally whine of the professor reaches them. Uhura seems to think it over.

“I’m willing to pay.” He offers graciously, sweetening the pot.

“You have nothing I want.”

“Consider it an IOU.” Jim wheedles.

“No” She says finally.

He frowns, taken aback.

Uhura taps rapidly on her PADD and sends him her comm. number.

“I want a promise. Whatever I teach you, you’d better put it to good use.”

There is a light yellow sheen over her eyes. He answers back in kind.

“Oh you have no idea.”


End file.
